contact & CV

Footnotes To Life

Present & past Exhibitions

True Colors, AkzoNobel Art Foundation  at Kunstmuseum, 31 May to 29 September 2024, The Hague

The AkzoNobel Art Foundation has been an important player in the art world for almost thirty years. The foundation supports talented young artists as well as established artists with commissions and acquisitions. These artworks literally bring color to the daily lives of employees and guests at the offices of the Dutch paints and coatings manufacturer. Eight years ago, the Art Foundation opened an art space at its headquarters in Amsterdam that is accessible to the public free of charge. Works from the art collection are regularly on loan in museums in the Netherlands and abroad, though the this is the first time that the art collection is the main focus of a museum show.

Color in all its facets is one of the key elements of both the AkzoNobel Art Foundation’s collection policy and this exhibition, alongside the subjects of space, the individual and society.True Colors features work by more than sixty artists worldwide, whose work addresses these subjects. Work from the AkzoNobel Art Foundation by Steven Aalders, Yael Bartana, Ann Veronica Janssens, Emma Talbot, Alan Uglow, Marthe Wéry and others will enter into a dialogue with work from Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s collection, by Donald Judd, Sarah Lucas, Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Charley Toorop and others. Color makes for interesting combinations. Works by herman de vries and Pieter Paul Pothoven (AkzoNobel Art Foundation), that explore color and pigments, share a space with the work of Isa Genzken (Kunstmuseum Den Haag), who uses a highly industrial palette.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, simplicity of form, exploration and complexity of color scheme highlights painter Steven Aalders’ (AkzoNobel Art Foundation) kinship with predecessors like Piet Mondrian and Donald Judd (Kunstmuseum Den Haag).

Artists often flawlessly know how to identify and depict our vulnerabilities, portraying who we are and where we are, both as a society and as individual. An important pillar in the collection of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation and in that of the Kunstmuseum is 'la condition humaine'; the essence of being human, and the quest for identity.True Colorswill therefore unfold to reveal a rich variety of images and stories that cast a sharp eye over today’s turbulent world. Otobong Nkanga, for example, uses a poetic visual language as a plea against the exploitation of the earth. And Femmy Otten and Buhlebezwe Siwani reveal the essence of humanity in all its strength and fragility.

True Colors - AkzoNobel Art Foundation at Kunstmuseum Den Haag promises an exciting mix of work from different generations and disciplines. Young international talents stand side by side with renowned artists, in complementary combinations, telling a powerful and colorful story, both literally and metaphorically. A narrative deeply rooted in art history while resonating with the pulse of contemporary society.

Can't We Just Get Along? group exhibition at Gallery Stevenson, 2024, Amsterdam

On 22 November, a political party that compares the Quran to Mein Kampf, and would like to ban the construction of mosques, won the Dutch elections. They propose to strip people with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality if convicted of a crime, and, using vulgar slurs, have floated a tax on the wearing of a hijab.

Much of the rest of their party platform also directly contravenes the Dutch constitution, in particular those clauses that proclaim

equality before the law and freedom of religion, a fact the party leader happily acknowledges. While they have vowed to set aside temporarily their more egregious proposals in order to create a viable coalition government, they have not distanced themselves from even their most violent rhetoric. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the leader of this party will become the next prime minister.

This exhibition is conceived as a gesture of protest, in the spirit of Pastor Niemöller’s poem ‘First They Came’. It draws on a history and tradition of art as protest with which, as a gallery with roots in South Africa, we are particularly familiar.

The Dutch elections happened against a global backdrop of increasing nativism and xenophobia. The levels of destruction in the DRC, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza have shattered the illusion of a livable status quo, and a long list of other conflicts fought along

religious, ethnic, ideological or national lines continue to cause untold suffering. Racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice are on the rise; violence against

the LGBTQ+ community in Amsterdam is increasingly normalised; and social media allows us to retreat ever further into dangerous echo chambers.

The title of this exhibition is a paraphrase of Rodney King’s cri de coeur at a press conference during the LA protests in the wake of the acquittal of the police officers who had brutally beaten him: ‘I just want to say – you know – can we, can we all get along?

Can we, can we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for the older people and the kids?’ His sentiment was not a dismissal of protest, but an expression of the despair and hopelessness one can feel in the face of violence and pain inflicted by one human being

on another. The phrase became the name of a series of parties in Cape Town around the time of our gallery’s founding, which were a form of resistance through joy against the persistent divisions entrenched by apartheid.

We have invited some 45 artists and writers from or living in the Netherlands to make a

contribution to our protest in any form they feel appropriate.

Machteld Aardse & Femke Kempkes with Levison Gijsbertha

Parvez Alam

Cian-Yu Bai

Marwan Bassiouni

Desiré van den Berg

BSDWCORP.

Rineke Dijkstra

Brian Elstak

Fix Everything

Kenneth Geurts & Luna Hupperetz

Talisa Harjono

Domenique Himmelsbach de Vries

Jan Hoek

Iris Kensmil

Natasja Kensmil

Charlie Koolhaas

Anouk Kruithof

Nokukhanya Langa

Benjamin Li

Sjoerd Martens

Neo Matloga

Meersoortig Collectief

Marjo Meijer

Tumelo Mtimkhulu

Anke Noorman

Oey Tjeng Sit

Anna-Bella Papp

Bruin Parry

Mounir Raji

Tadhg Read

Klaas Rommelaere

Dion Rosina

Sam Samiee

Viviane Sassen

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Thato Toeba

Jan Voss

Tommy Wieringa

Farren van Wyk

Curated by

Xiaoxiao Xu Joost Bosland

Famil Zaman Noëlle de Haan

When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind, No Man's Art Gallery, 2023, Amsterdam

The rooms of No Man’s Art Gallery show over two-hundred rarely exhibited drawings - spanning from 2008 - 2023 - that are thematically divided into landscape and flora, imaginative scenes, figuration and still life. The title of the exhibition alludes to an overarching theme throughout the artist's artistic and research-based endeavours: voicing a poetic eroticism or playfulness in the light of crises.

Samiee refers to his practice as post-cinematic. Central to his practice are installations embedded within the architecture of the exhibition space. The way they are edited relate to the process of playing with semantics. An example of this is seen in relation to his models, friends and conversants, revealing a deep connection of shared moments and dialogue that influenced sensual, political and relational elements guided by the artist's long involvement in psychoanalytic settings and thinking.

While Samiee separates and engages independently with drawing as a rationalist enterprise of measuring and recording the real world, his other endeavour, poetry and deconstruction of language, intertwines as subject matter of the drawings. Drawing and visual arts are put to work to materialise notions, concepts and abstract constellations that have seemingly lost their touch with materiality. Finding life-driven forces within situations that are deadening; finding a playfulness at the moment of drawing still life, machines and objects of everyday life; envisioning familiar and unfamiliar landscapes of mountains and lowlands, and collecting thoughts and ideas for a future view. Through the unique installation of the drawing archive, new connections appear between nodal points of the works.

His drawings breathe life into verses from poetry, figures from world mythology, and his own lines, avoiding mere literary illustration. An abstract scene of a lover's embrace is interlaced with a written fragment of Mohammad Reza Sharjarian's "A Lover's Plight," a Persian song calling on lovers to pour their hearts into their cups like tulips blushing. Samiee's recurring exploration of the connection between a verse of poetry and drawing or painting such as in his use of the promethean motif, leads to fresh interpretations and interconnectedness among these semantic points.

Amid over two hundred drawings we find scenes of mourning, death, the crucifixion and Iran-Iraq war tragedies yet always with the presence of the sanctuary that is beauty. The drawings invite access to the subtext of Samiee’s oeuvre, as amongst the chaos it is the beautiful thighs, chests, the Mountains Zagros Ranges and the blossoming orchid branch that offer solace.

Seen from a chronological point of view, and if compared with the exhibiting trajectory of the artist, one is able to observe how Samiee challenges literary hegemony within his culture and others by infusing architecture, physicality, color, and line into a playful discourse. His work exposes and puts on trial ideologies that regulate bodies, allowing both himself and viewers to confront the material reality of his subjects. In his more recent drawings, an embrace of the decorative and the poetic become increasingly visible.

When Hell Breaks Loose I'll Tell You Your Legs Were Always On My Mind reveals a decade of the backstage of the artist practice, research, obsessions, tests and notes which hold together a wide range of emotions, fantasies, and ideas that Samiee has relied on or will return to in the future of his ongoing explorations.

175 Trials & Errors, Solo exhibition, Dastan's Basement, 2023, Tehran

175 Trials & Errors is Samiee's tribute to "drawing" as the foundation of painting. Samiee believes drawing serves rationalism and structure to painting (every metamorphosis in the structure of a painting presupposes a mutation in the drawing). Samiee studied painting under teachers in Iran and the Netherlands who saw drawing as its cornerstone. He has been drawing since 2005 yet has never made a solo exhibit of such works. "175 Trials & Errors" braves to show works that paved the way for Samiee's artistic experimentations through trial and error. Drawings of Samiee are thematically hung (figures, flowers, landscapes, and imaginative drawings) within the restructured interior of Dastan's Basement that the artist has done. The exhibit’s title lays bare the artist's relationship with his creations – the humble self-organization of drawing.

The Sites of Ruin, Group Exhibition, 12 Gates, Philadelphia, 2022

An exhibition of paintings accompanied with excerpts of modern and classical Persian poetry,“Blush of the Soil” surveys multiple painterly and poetic registers. The artist invites us to experiencehis personal journey at an unusually intimate level. Setting out more than a decade, Samiee returnshome more than just a traveler: a pilgrim. Laden with both glory and defeat comes a difficult choice:what message and what gifts does one return bearing? This exhibition is a testament to both the freedom and the restraint that Sam Samiee has practiced incarefully crafting that message. Manifold and layered: his work leaks from the Nastaliq discourse ofpoetic titles that line the walls, holding each painting. It dances on the canvas like a colorful witnessto the hard-won freedom of his movements. It hides behind the pillars that usually carry Samiee’s work: poetry and painting, their traditional forms ground up and melted to resemble the mercury that allows for contemporary usage. Like with mirrors, the message thrown back at the viewer is usually a reflection of themselves.The first item to prominently emerge from Samiee’s suitcase is the very axiom of the show. An ode tothe premise of premises: death, inevitably so. As an homage to Hans Holbein (the Younger)’s TheBody of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, this painting removes from death both the glory and thetragedy of dying. Forget the idealistic, abstract concept of death: here, we have an importantmoment in art history re-signified by Samiee, something as tangible as the luscious stems of Omar Khayyam’s tulips that emerge from the very dust that we all turn into. Apart from the vivid coloursscraped free from beneath the blackness, Dead Christ in Coffin carries Samiee’s experience ofhaving tailored the painting to the size of a coffin that would carry his body.But before that, we are invited to a celebration of uncertainty. The brushstrokes and colours ofSamiee’s Untitled works serve as an ode to the difficult journey towards relinquishing control. In Bonnard à la Foerg, Samiee salutes his fellow pilgrims on their path: Bonnard, forever porous in hisdepiction of the world, and Foerg, who seems to have arrived at freedom by climbing through a vastnumber of rigid frames.This lesson is one that Samiee wishes to impart upon his return home: embrace uncertainty. Cherishit like the moment the curtain opens to a stage; ripe with potential and possibility, the vague outlineof an adventure yet to be had — even if the Elephants might Stumble. Doubt becomes an ingredientintegral to preventing our societies from turning into stone. The Scent of Dawn evokes this exact imagery: something we might not yet be able to touch and see, but can nevertheless perceive withour more intuitive senses.Now, how we deal with this first premise is entirely up to us. Does death — be it our own, or that ofour gods — constitute the beginning or the end of freedom? The loss of control, or the foundation thereof? When we eventually make it to While Cloudbursts at Nowruz Wash the Tulip's Face andNameless Flower, will we witness the fresh naïveté and the overwhelming beauty of the scenery asan external phenomenon, or as something that not only has the potential of emerging from ourminds, but from our very bodies, turned to dust? After all, what are we but soil, blushing, after aspring shower? We are escorted out by two promethean allegories: the Greek Titan, supreme trickster andcontemporary symbol for the industrial, mechanic, phallic energy, has broken his chains. The worldaround him is cratered with death, famine and discrimination fanned by the fear of the unknown.After a lifetime of dealing in fire and fury, Prometheus fills his fists, this time around with colours,female energy, the gestures of dancing, and uncertainty. We witness a humble world that will, alas,never be. Or will it?It is with this question, nay, this challenge, that the last piece is pulled from the suitcase. And yet, thepilgrim blushes with shame at the humbleness of his mementoes. For all the weight he has carriedhome, his gift is but a promise: like a visitor to a garden, intoxicated by his journey, he cannot bringflowers. He can only speak of their fragrance, and invite each viewer to search for the gate of that garden within themselves. The real treasure is as priceless as it is simple: a handful of blushing soil. Shanay Hubmann

* Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French illustrator, printmaker and painter who is known for the decorative qualities of his work. Leaving Paris andsettling in Provence, he dedicated his time to painting nature and his wife, and contrary to other avant-garde painters, created implications ofconfusion and uncertainty in his style of painting. His work has been recently gone through review, many believing his importance among post-warartists to be comparable to Henri Matisse.

** Günther Förg (1952-2013) was a German graphic designer, sculptor and photographer who began his career by photographing architecturefocusing on window frames, specifically in fascist architecture. During his life and work, he followed a path of lyrical abstraction, taking an anti-fascistapproach and following the footsteps of Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.

Sam Samiee wishes to thank the team at Dastan’s Basement, specifically Roshan Takallomi and Sam Roknivand, for their help insetting up this exhibition. The research and writing of this text would not have been possible without the help of Shanay Hubmann andRiaz Howey.I like to dedicate this exhibition to Lily Mansouri who gave me my first Gulistan of Sa'adi. Sam Samiee December 2020.

Minefield Playground, Duo Exhibition Fereydoun Ave & Sam Samiee, Hamzianpour & Kia Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022

Warrior’s Rest is part of Fereydoun Ave’s ongoing Warrior series, which has continuallyproblematized the relationship between the warrior archetype and its historical, literary, andmythological iterations. All along, Ave has rigorously questioned and subverted thedefinitions of masculinity embodied by the warrior, cultivating a tense relationship betweenthe macho characters in the works and the decidedly non-macho elements that surroundthem. In Warrior’s Rest, the warriors are once again depicted with iconography thatinterrogates the hardness and harshness traditionally associated with masculinity; however,the overarching sensation here is not one of tension but, as the series’ title suggests, arestfulness. The warriors are presented in various states of repose, stripped of all forms ofarmor (literal and figurative), naked and prone yet fully at rest. Their bodies and the objectsaround them – flowers, bedsheets, carpets, plants – exude a soness and sensuality thatgoes beyond previous works in the Warrior series. Even the helmet, a powerfully iconicelement of the warrior image, is treated with affection – an ever-present partner whose placeis no longer on the hero’s head and so can no longer mask the warrior’s individual identity orobscure his humanity. As such, these works constitute an expression of Ave’s wish “that menwill tire of war and from time to time want to rest.” In some instances, Ave goes so far as toreduce the warrior to a mere shadow, an absent presence, ephemeral and ethereal – nothingmore and nothing less than an idea that materializes briefly and then recedes out ofmateriality. The same interplay of material and immaterial informs the show’s other series by Ave, TwoAlphabets. While alphabets are the material dimension of language – its building blocks, as itwere – Mr. Ave treats them in a way that both acknowledges and vitiates their materiality. Thealphabetical letters are stripped of their primary function (communication) and endowed withthe freedom to PLAY. Crucially, the letters are arranged so as to resist any kind of a reading –literal or figurative – and empowered to behave independently of any imposed or expectedfunctionality. As Roland Barthes has said of the work of Cy Twombly (who was in fact, one ofAve’s mentors), the letters are presented with a kind of indolence, like a garment that has beenworn and deposited on the floor – though Ave’s approach to the alphabet is an indolence bornnot of sloth but of a deliberate playfulness, a desire to let their graphic (rather thaniconographic) essence emerge. This allows the two alphabets - Latin and Perso-Arabic - to enterinto a spirited dialogue, emanating an intimacy which foregrounds the fact that they are bothbranches of the same (Indo European) language tree.Ave has oen presented his work in the form of co-operative shows, and for this show he hascalled on Sam Samiee to create an installation incorporating both artists’ work. Samiee’s ownwork is characterized by a break from the tradition of flat painting and a return to the questionof how artists can represent the three-dimensional world in the space of painting as a metaphorfor a set of ideas. In designing this exhibition, Samiee treats the gallery as an editable spacewhose possibilities and limitations can be used, manipulated, and unmade as the artist sees fit.Samiee considers the work of installation as a performative act; and indeed the entire showbecomes a performance that immerses viewers in the environment, incorporating them asco-performers in a work whose scale far exceeds the sum of the physical objects present. Usingboth two-dimensional media and spatial objects, Samiee amplifies the sense of beauty andcolor in Ave’s pieces while simultaneously mediating and altering the gaze that is directed atthose pieces -- pushing viewers to be present to their own presence in the gallery space and totheir own part in creating a discursive relationship with the individual works and with theexhibit as a whole.In his work, Samiee endeavors to synthesize the visual culture of the West with the heavilyword-centered culture of the East; his approach is grounded in part in his research and lectureson Iranian art history and the ways in which Iranian modernists reconciled the new canons ofWestern art with their local frameworks of art production That research has brought him tocontemplate and find insight into the role of Fereydoun Ave within Iranian art history and hiscontribution to the evolution of Global Modernism -- a subject which Samiee further engageswith and elucidates in this show. In addition, Samiee highlights how Ave’s work celebrates thefascination with male beauty, referencing in particular the Greek notions of the masculine idealwhile at the same time pointing out an ugliness behind the machismo of war and destruction –intensifying the poetic aspects of awe and dejection one finds in masculinity and its attendantbeauty.In Ave’s pieces, images are conjoined to create scenographic essays; and so Samiee’s workhere can be read as a scenography of scenographies, hinting at a fractal relationship betweenthe two artists and their work. In this way Samiee ramps up the playfulness and evades what hecalls “the mine-field of the mind-field” – the temptation for artists to think too much about whatparts of the collaborative work are “mine” and what parts are not.

A Bit of Unruly Complexity, Group Exhibition curated by Misal Adnan

Yıldız, Sanatorium, September - November 2022, Istanbul

This exhibition is dedicated to what science brings to our lives ascomplexity considering our interpretations of nature with our perception of reality and cognitive limits. A BIT OF UNRULY COMPLEXITY ishungry for emotional intelligence, genuine connections, visual poetry,and painting. In the age of ‘complicated’ relationships, it proposes acknowledging, recognizing, and understanding various forms of ‘complexity’ -specifically the notion of complexity- within the contingentnature of things or events.Either a human being with developmentalissues and social dilemmas; or a ‘machine’ with its parts; individuals,societies, and communities; or our universe with its unimaginablescale are examples of “the complex’’ in their full meanings.

As an exhibition, it consistently magnets specific artistic perspectivesthat reflect on complexities, which emerge from interconnectedness,ecological regularities, and geo-centered subjects through engagingwith critical forms, which connect us around/against this question -orproblem of (Western) humanism/subjectivism. As an ironic gesture forits mission-impossible, the phrase added for the title, “-a bit” criticallyasks some space for the local context, experimental approach as wellas contextual thinking regarding the limits of any exhibition space,calendar, or budget.

The making of the exhibition, research materials, and curatorial textwith all its further notes will be included in the December 2022 issueof the publication “xx-yy-magazine” led by Sergen Şehitoğlu.

In this booklet, we share the artists’ answers to our questions aimingto make their voices more present, and their statements more clearduring your visit.

Art is complex, as life, and science, and needs your attention, connection, and care.

The Two-Headed Horse, Duo Exhibition with Agnieszka Polska, Geroge Kargl Galerie, 2021, Vienna

As we continue past the painful births of modernism and digitalisation into today’s world, we begin to conceive the amniotic fluid that gavebirth to Samiee and Polska: contemporary poets whose process of chewing up and spewing out the world is no longer kicked into gear by thebucolic walk in the countryside. Gone are the days of Linnaeus, Freud and Jung where it was possible to classify the world: we are now in a timeof chaos, and our artists draw from the infinity of data - images, sounds, letters and words - that are thrown at us as we venture through life inthe 21st century.

Both artists, each in their own way, lift this mammoth and hurl it at us, be it on a canvas or on a screen. Their works carry more than just avisual experience: Samiee’s works are depictions of the mind, frames within frames. We witness more than just paint: there is dance, thereare words, there are after-images that spring from a dark matter that projects them, from inside, into our mind.
Polska creates verses with her immersive visuals: landscapes of subconsciousness, laced with words, spoken and sung in an otherworldlyfashion that leaves us questioning the absolute value of time. Through seemingly empty scenarios, we are transported into our pandemic-eraconfinement through the eyes of a couple, encapsulated in a bubble of intimacy and love, observing the world through a digital peephole. Andthe world stares back as it melts into pixels and re-emerges into new landscapes: “Love is a token in the data market”, says the demon. Anoffering we must make in order to participate. It seems we have finally gazed long enough into the abyss: the abyss is gazing into us.Andhereweare,ourwanderingmindsanarchive,evermultiplyingthisabundanceofimpulses,thismagnitudeofnothingness.Wearesurroundedby a crescendo of data and information, and our overwhelmed brains cannot but see God: when confronted with a boundless phenomenon beyond comprehension, we cannot but take shelter inthe concept of the divine.

And yet, in this primordial soup of everything, thereis also a great deal of nothing. The image of the thingis but the absence of the thing**. We witness iconsreduced to ashes, once holy words losing their spell asthey flicker across a propaganda screen; works of artturn into inflation and deflation in a blatant display ofthe absurdity of assigning excess value to empty things.And thus, surrounded by noise, we enter the hall ofknights. “Noise is defined by scale”, we respond to thedemon:thespellisbroken. Wewitnessthetwo-headedhorse, a dancing image, bathed in an angelic voice. Andwe are left wondering whether we found the sense inall this abundance, whether we managed to surpassthe scale. Like King Arthur, we have a go at extractingExcalibur. Will we?

Shanay Hubmann

Here Comes Everybody, Duo Show with Narcisse Tordoir, Emergent, 2021, Veurne

What Joyce does to literature is what Samiee and Tordoir are bravely attempting to do to art. The exhibition begins with death and ends with afuneral. But the red line we planned to follow through the space turns out to be, instead, a horizon. We become part of a conversation betweentwo brilliant minds, with subjects cherry-picked and yet related in a multitude of ways. The ground we are about to cover expands, literally,across the entire world. How is this possible? The answer is simple: this exhibition, much like the plot of Finnegan’s Wake and the Quran, takesplace in the dreams of prophets.

The story told across the various spaces of HCE is one of renewal: the annihilation of the Self that both Islamic mystics as well as westernphilosophers so often refer and aspire to. We begin the journey by witnessing the killing of our main characters! But this “first act” is more thanjust a town square execution for us to watch: it is an invitation. To join both artists in first acknowledging and then challenging the ego.
Every attempt to describe Samiee and Tordoir’s interaction leads me to the imagery of a dance; and not necessarily one between humans. Whatmakes both artists stand out is their ability to “create works without seeing them”, to begin a journey without a clear image of the finish line. It isone thing to allow this freedom in one’s own work, another to attempt it when entangled in somebody else’s arms. The magic of collectivity, asan unfinished ode to Modernism, takes place as a collage: one dances in the other’s adoration. One’s excess spills into the other’s containment.

Prints. Photographs. Spray paint: the slow weaving of a nest in whichwe, the witness, can rest ever so briefly. From there experience theartworks - positioned sometimes separate, sometimes complimentary,sometimes overlapping - the way we experience a dream. Rationalitywould never be enough to explain such phenomena. And this is key.And so we continue our journey through the space, towards anotherlate guest at this exhibition: Pier Paolo Pasolini, who perfected thewalk of the rational-emotional tightrope: a gay marxist fascinated withhistorical materialism, celebrated by the average man for providing a(more recent) lens through which to gaze into more distant history. TheGospel According to St. Matthew and 1001 Nights serve as an ode tocelebrate his humane and mystical understanding of reality. Modern andContemporary Art being flush with anti-religiosity and anti-mysticism,thelikesofPasolinishowedushowtofullyembracetheseworldswithoutsurrendering the rational one - often at the cost of their lives. We arereminded to go above and beyond clichés and identity politics.

“Here Comes Everybody” serves as a memorial of all those who cannotbe here - whose lives were interrupted by the hostile conditions thatforbade history from ripening. We get a sense of how much more thereis to explore, and that this is only a beginning.

Shanay Hubmann

The Blush of the Soil, Solo Exhibition, Dastan Gallery, 2020

An exhibition of paintings accompanied with excerpts of modern and classical Persian poetry,“Blush of the Soil” surveys multiple painterly and poetic registers. The artist invites us to experiencehis personal journey at an unusually intimate level. Setting out more than a decade, Samiee returnshome more than just a traveler: a pilgrim. Laden with both glory and defeat comes a difficult choice:what message and what gifts does one return bearing? This exhibition is a testament to both the freedom and the restraint that Sam Samiee has practiced incarefully crafting that message. Manifold and layered: his work leaks from the Nastaliq discourse ofpoetic titles that line the walls, holding each painting. It dances on the canvas like a colorful witnessto the hard-won freedom of his movements. It hides behind the pillars that usually carry Samiee’s work: poetry and painting, their traditional forms ground up and melted to resemble the mercury that allows for contemporary usage. Like with mirrors, the message thrown back at the viewer is usually a reflection of themselves.The first item to prominently emerge from Samiee’s suitcase is the very axiom of the show. An ode tothe premise of premises: death, inevitably so. As an homage to Hans Holbein (the Younger)’s TheBody of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, this painting removes from death both the glory and thetragedy of dying. Forget the idealistic, abstract concept of death: here, we have an importantmoment in art history re-signified by Samiee, something as tangible as the luscious stems of Omar Khayyam’s tulips that emerge from the very dust that we all turn into. Apart from the vivid coloursscraped free from beneath the blackness, Dead Christ in Coffin carries Samiee’s experience ofhaving tailored the painting to the size of a coffin that would carry his body.But before that, we are invited to a celebration of uncertainty. The brushstrokes and colours ofSamiee’s Untitled works serve as an ode to the difficult journey towards relinquishing control. In Bonnard à la Foerg, Samiee salutes his fellow pilgrims on their path: Bonnard, forever porous in hisdepiction of the world, and Foerg, who seems to have arrived at freedom by climbing through a vastnumber of rigid frames.This lesson is one that Samiee wishes to impart upon his return home: embrace uncertainty. Cherishit like the moment the curtain opens to a stage; ripe with potential and possibility, the vague outlineof an adventure yet to be had — even if the Elephants might Stumble. Doubt becomes an ingredientintegral to preventing our societies from turning into stone. The Scent of Dawn evokes this exact imagery: something we might not yet be able to touch and see, but can nevertheless perceive withour more intuitive senses.Now, how we deal with this first premise is entirely up to us. Does death — be it our own, or that ofour gods — constitute the beginning or the end of freedom? The loss of control, or the foundation thereof? When we eventually make it to While Cloudbursts at Nowruz Wash the Tulip's Face andNameless Flower, will we witness the fresh naïveté and the overwhelming beauty of the scenery asan external phenomenon, or as something that not only has the potential of emerging from ourminds, but from our very bodies, turned to dust? After all, what are we but soil, blushing, after aspring shower? We are escorted out by two promethean allegories: the Greek Titan, supreme trickster andcontemporary symbol for the industrial, mechanic, phallic energy, has broken his chains. The worldaround him is cratered with death, famine and discrimination fanned by the fear of the unknown.After a lifetime of dealing in fire and fury, Prometheus fills his fists, this time around with colours,female energy, the gestures of dancing, and uncertainty. We witness a humble world that will, alas,never be. Or will it?It is with this question, nay, this challenge, that the last piece is pulled from the suitcase. And yet, thepilgrim blushes with shame at the humbleness of his mementoes. For all the weight he has carriedhome, his gift is but a promise: like a visitor to a garden, intoxicated by his journey, he cannot bringflowers. He can only speak of their fragrance, and invite each viewer to search for the gate of that garden within themselves. The real treasure is as priceless as it is simple: a handful of blushing soil. Shanay Hubmann

* Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was a French illustrator, printmaker and painter who is known for the decorative qualities of his work. Leaving Paris andsettling in Provence, he dedicated his time to painting nature and his wife, and contrary to other avant-garde painters, created implications ofconfusion and uncertainty in his style of painting. His work has been recently gone through review, many believing his importance among post-warartists to be comparable to Henri Matisse.

** Günther Förg (1952-2013) was a German graphic designer, sculptor and photographer who began his career by photographing architecturefocusing on window frames, specifically in fascist architecture. During his life and work, he followed a path of lyrical abstraction, taking an anti-fascistapproach and following the footsteps of Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.

Sam Samiee wishes to thank the team at Dastan’s Basement, specifically Roshan Takallomi and Sam Roknivand, for their help insetting up this exhibition. The research and writing of this text would not have been possible without the help of Shanay Hubmann andRiaz Howey.I like to dedicate this exhibition to Lily Mansouri who gave me my first Gulistan of Sa'adi. Sam Samiee December 2020.

Love gone vagabond, Intellect fell after it,«عشق آواره شد خرد در جستجویش», De liefde raakte ontheemd, het verstaand er naar opzoek, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 2018

Iranian-born artist and essayist Sam Samiee (b. 1988, Teheran) makes installations consisting of multiple paintings. He combines this two-dimensional medium with spatial objects, testing the potential and the limits of traditional painting.

Samiee is also a researcher, exploring western painting, philosophy and psychoanalysis and studying the rich history of Persian literature. He attempts in his work to unite the west’s visual culture with the east’s word-oriented culture. By breaking with the tradition of the two-dimensional painting, he repeatedly questions how an artist can portray the three-dimensional world. As he himself says, ‘Painting is a way of further developing and shaping all my ideas and thoughts’.

Samiee, who works in Amsterdam, Berlin and Teheran, and studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam in 2014-2015, will be presenting an installation combining works from 2014 to the present day in the Gemeentemuseum’s Projects Gallery. He will also integrate into the installation a number of paintings from the museum’s collection, by the artists Constant, Paul Thek and Emo Verkerk, with whom he feels a kinship.

The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (After Laplanche) at We Don't Need Another Hero, Berlin Biennale X, Z/KU, Berlin, 2018

Talking to Sam Samiee about his painting practice is an utterly high-speed undertaking. He belongs to that rare group of artists who like to talk– and listen. The amount of knowledge that the painter pours into the first few minutes of a dialogue is impressive. He moves seamlessly from the ninthvcentury invention of Farsi to how this coincided with the emergence of painting in the West as a technique to negotiate metaphysics, and then to contemporary psychoanalysis, culminating in possible answers to the question of why Germans still haven’t learned to mourn properly. This all makes sense considering Samiee’s background. Born and raised in Tehran, the artist completed his formal education in theNetherlands and currently lives and works in Berlin. The painter’s intellectual trajectories are emblematic of his visual landscapes; which is not to say they are the same. He is well aware of when to apply which mode of communication. His installations, often composed of paintings and objects, break open the normative order and iconography of traditional European painting. Samiee synthesizes this history with one of his recent research interests, the Persian term adab, used to describe the dual concept of ethics and aesthetics. His work is heavily influenced byPersian literary legacies and their close kinship to contemporary psychoanalysis. Fusing these knowledge systems allows the artist to enter into or create new spaces and temporalities, beginning on the canvas and usually extending into the three-dimensional exhibition space with the support of objects as a means of challenging hegemonic visual practices. This approach is always driven by a desire to deflect the conditioned gaze of viewers and witnesses from conventional interpretations or processes of meaning-making towards new fields of possibility; a procedure that evolves from the attempt to unhinge familiar subjectivities or positions of subjecthood, blurring the idea of the self-contained,rational Western subject. In Samiee›s oeuvre this manifests itself in what he calls “shrines of abstract art,” heterodimensional spaces that allow the viewer to mourn, reflect, and pause for a moment.For example, assembled in the gallery space his paintings The Bedroom Posters (2015-16) depict the queering of (male-ascribed) physiques or disproportionately painted celestial constellations installed next to the warm light of a bedside lamp.As a whole, such constellations of works and objects evoke asense of disorientation. They also have a performative character; Samiee’s installations prompt viewers to physically situate themselves in space and attune themselves to the atmosphere. One can read this as a call to temporarily accept disturbing environments, unknown and unfamiliar, which ultimately invite us to actively participate in the birthing of new, more interrelated worlds. Leading up to the 10th Berlin Biennale, Samiee continued his explorations of the idea of adab during a two-month studio residency at the ZK/U-Center forArt and Urbanistics, where his work The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (2018) is on view. – Magnus Elias Rosengarten

The Painted Bird: Dreams and Nightmares of Europe, Marres House for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, 2017

What is the real bridge between Europe and its neighbors?” Tangible objects or untold, unknown stories? Within a group show addressing the Dreams and Nightmares of Europe, “Europe in 2017 … on the verge of despair,” Samiee drew inspiration from Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.” In this short story, Borges sketches a portrait in which Spanish Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) finds a home in the imagination and works of Dutch philosopher Siger of Brabant (Zeger Van Brabandt). Engaging two performers in visualizing this imaginary fraternity — two philosophers who had never met, and yet their imagined kinship changed the future of Europe and the world — the painting was an outcome of the United Painting project directed by Gijs Frieling.

A Camp, a group exhibition curated by Sam Samiee, Dastan's Basement, Tehran, 2017

همیشه نمی‌توانی بگویی در ذهنت چه می‌گذرد، یا چه حسی داری. ممکن است بگویی نه! این نه! نه، این هم نه! اما نتوانی بیان کنی دقیقاً منظورت چیست. یا شاید تعارف داری، یا باید تعارف داشته باشی. ولی شاید بتوانی با کرشمه‌ای با غمزه‌ای با اشاره‌ای کاری کنی دوزاری طرف بیافتد.

اگر این‌کاره باشی، و ابزارهای بیانی دیگر هم چندان دلخوشت نکنند، چند سالی که به این منوال بگذرانی دیگر خبره می‌شوی. نمی‌گویی، نشان هم نمی‌دهی، بعضی وقت‌ها لجاجت می‌کنی، بعضی وقت‌ها هم می‌روی چادر می‌زنی سر حرفی که در ذهن و تن و قلب داری و اطراق می‌کنی. اطراق می‌کنی و بر آن یک نکته که در ذهن داری پافشاری می‌کنی. بعد از مدتی به فشار پا هم نیاز نیست، همان حوالی آن‌قدر می‌مانی تا تو و منظور و هوا و درختان همه به گونه‌ات عادت کنند و بشوی جزئی از صحنه. اما نمی‌دانند سودای آن‌چه در سر داری.

این‌ها را سوزان سانتاگ نگفته. این‌ها را من هم نمی‌گویم. تقریباً عده‌ی کثیری از شاعران ساکت به لطایف‌الحیل گوناگون، بودن خویش را این‌گونه نه که ثابت کرده باشند، که اشاره را قابل‌دیدن کرده‌اند تا یا ناظران بگویند خب پس چه در سر داری یا حتی اگر هیچی نمی‌گویند و جلو نمی‌آیند به این کمپ و چادر و اطراق و آتش عادت کنند.

اسکار وایلدِ خدا بیامرز نتوانست بگوید آن‌چه می‌خواست بگوید. اما می‌دانست که حتماً نمی‌تواند بگوید. ولی چیزهای دیگری گفت که تا خواننده بخواند اگر اهل دل باشد شکش می‌برد. همان شک را که با خود حمل کند از خم و چم روزگار، نه که کافی‌ست، اما چه می‌شود کرد، بعضاً همان حساسیت تنها چیزی است که می‌توان به جهان عرضه کرد تا اهل نظر بیابند روزی و بشکافند و بشنوند و قول بدهند که سر اسرار نگشایند.

بعضی وقت‌ها هم ناگفتنی نیست، اما گفتنش هم کمکی نمی‌کند، باید باشی و با آن منش نشست و برخاست کنی. اما امروزه کی وقت دارد؟ همین که قدم‌رنجه فرمودید به کمپ چندروزه‌ی ما در این‌جا ممنونیم.

به کمپ ما خوش آمدید. بعضی‌وقت‌ها در جزیره‌ی هرمز به‌پایش می‌کنیم، اما پیش از این در چمن دانشگاه هنر مشقش می‌کردیم. چشمه‌ای از حساسیتی بوده و هست که یک‌به‌یک از هریک یادش گرفته‌ایم و بچه‌مان نشده ولی ما بچه‌اش شده‌ایم.

در ساحت تخیل و تفکر فارسی‌زبانان تئوریزه‌کردن شاعرانگیِ هنرِ تجسمی کار به جایی نمی‌برد. پس همان‌طور که بالتوس بزرگ گفت: بیایید به نقاشی‌ها نگاه کنیم.

You can’t always say what’s going on in your mind, what you’re feeling. Maybe you say, “No! Not this! No, not that either!” But you just can’t utter exactly what you mean. Or maybe you do taarof, or you are compelled to show taarof. But maybe with a coquettish glance, with some blandishment, some sign, you might do something that the penny would drop for the other.

If these are the shoes you fill, and other media don’t bring you satisfaction, with a few years of this routine you will become an expert. You won't speak, you also won't show. Sometimes you act stubbornly, other times you pitch a tent over the words that you have in mind, body and heart and you set up camp. You set up camp and that one point you have in your mind you peg to the ground. After some time, the weight of your foot is unnecessary; you stay around until you, your point, the air, the trees would all get used to your type and you might become part of the scene. But still they won't know what enterprise you have in mind.

These words weren’t said by Susan Sontag. They also aren’t my words. In fact a large number of silent poets of diverse delicacies, not out of a need to prove their existence, have made a signifier visible that observers might ask, what is on your mind? Or even if these observers don’t come forward and nothing is said, at least they would get used to the sight and site of this camp and tent and settlement and fire.

Oscar Wilde, peace be upon him, couldn’t say what he wanted to say. But for sure he knew that he could not say it. But he said other things such that when a reader reads, if of a similar shade of heart, one could carry some doubt. If one can bear that same doubt through ups and downs — not that it is enough, but what can be done — sometimes that doubt is the only thing that one can offer to the world so that those of the same shade might find it someday, might open up, hear and yet promise not to enunciate the secret.

Other times it’s not unsayable, but saying it also won’t help. One should be there and spend time with that temper, but who has the time these days? We already appreciate very much that you took the pains to bear the march to our camp.

Welcome to our camp. We sometimes set up camp on the Island of Hormoz, but before that we were training in the field of the University of Art. It was a wellspring of sensibility and still is that one-by-one we have learned from each other. It hasn’t become our child, so much as we have become its child. In the Persianate arena of imagination and thought, theorisations of the poesis of visual arts don’t get anywhere. So, as the great Balthus said, “Let’s look at the paintings.”

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 From Susan Sontag, “Notes On ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation, (London: Penguin UK, 2009), 275-292. Essay originally published in 1964 in the Partisan Review.

1. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy.
2. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.
3. Style is everything. Genet’s ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet’s statement that “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde’s “in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style.” But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere’s Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.

Baroque, Group exhibition curated by Laurie Cluitmans, Fons Welters Galerie, 2016, Amsterdam

For this exhibition, Sam Samiee created an immersive, painterly installation that, through a playful ornamentation, incorporates video works by Taus Makhacheva and Kareem Lotfy. Samiee does not shy away from the ornamental. His so-called iPad drawings, for example, drawn with a simple application, are photocopied and multiplied to form ornamental framings. Within the context of his total installations, these patterns move beyond the decorative and reveal a fragmented autonomy. 

One would usually associate Baroque with the late-sixteenth and seventeenth century style in European art. Grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, movement and tension would be its ingredients to evoke emotional states, appealing to the senses. The three young artists in this exhibition, each in their own manner, reflect on ornamental motives and symbols in order to tell another, perhaps more unknown story, cross-referencing influences over time and geographies. Should we read these motives as aesthetics or as discourse?